I'm beginning to think that we're not dealing with interrogation at all. We're dealing with something insidious and familiar: rape camps. It appears that based upon some strange reading of Islam that says being raped is unusually unpleasant for Muslims, we are using rape as a military strategy. The same thing happened in Bosnia to Muslim women.

....Americans are apparently doing the same thing --- to men. There is just too much evidence of this wierd sexual violence and humiliation for it to be a coincidence. We have become the Serbs.

There is a must-read article in WAPO today on the hunger-striking detainees and there desperation.

One of the suicide attempts was witnessed by the detainee's lawyer:

Jumah Dossari had to visit the restroom, so the detainee made a quick joke with his American lawyer before military police guards escorted him to a nearby cell with a toilet. The U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had taken quite a toll on Dossari over the past four years, but his attorney, who was there to discuss Dossari's federal court case, noted his good spirits and thought nothing of his bathroom break.

Minutes later, when Dossari did not return, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan knocked on the cell door, calling out his client's name. When he did not hear a response, Colangelo-Bryan stepped inside and saw a three-foot pool of blood on the floor. Numb, the lawyer looked up to see Dossari hanging unconscious from a noose tied to the ceiling, his eyes rolled back, his tongue and lips bulging, blood pouring from a gash in his right arm.

24 detainees are now being force-fed. A vigil for the detainees was held in Washington at noon today by the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International and other human rights activists. They are calling upon the U.S. to:

• Give the detainees a fair hearing and immediately release those who have committed no crime.

• Provide adequate food, water, shelter, medical treatment and the observance of religious practices.

• Provide to families and legal counsel timely reports on the health status of detainees, especially those participating in the hunger strike.

• Provide independent investigators (domestic and international) access to all detainees.

Update: 500 detainees were released from Abu Ghraib today. They each got a new Koran and $25.00. [hat tip Raw Story.]

Numbers-wise, that's a start, but it's not enough:

U.S. forces are holding 13,885 detainees, including 5,074 at Abu Ghraib, behind barbed wire at several facilities across Iraq, up from a total of about 11,800 a month ago, a spokesman for the U.S. military's prison operations said.